CommVault, UbiStor Team Up on Data Protection, Operations

Commvault is working with UbiStor to enable the former company's Simpana 10 software "to scale modern data protection solutions and deliver insights on operations for both its business and for customers," according to the two companies.

What does this mean? We asked a key person at each of the companies.

To Dave Brooks, UbiStor CTO, we noted, "It sounds like CommVault's software enables UbiStor customers to save time, but also gain new insights into their data. Do these things work together, i.e., does more efficiency enable more insight?"

Dave: Initially these do not work together the first day the solution is installed, but over time they absolutely do. With Simpana software we gain operational efficiencies right out of the gate. As we collect more backup data we collect more analytics about the production data.

This gives us the ability to implement more efficiency in the solution through time. One of the more common improvements is implementing archiving on data over 120 days old to shrink backup windows, relieve data off expensive primary storage and improve server operational efficiency.

Roger: Can you take us through a real-world scenario or two where this new solution is going to benefit your customer?

Dave: A real-world scenario: After implementing CommVault and gathering analytics about their production data, we found that they were backing up a lot of unneeded data. They are a financial firm and they get high volumes of financial data constantly.

This "core" financial data is fed into their financial modeling software by their analyst and is used to produce unique financial data to be used by the company in a multitude of ways. It also creates a whole new data set. They then run reports against this new data set. In this scenario, all that was needed to be retained was the report data sets, and none of the data that was used to attain the new data set. This reduced almost 20 Terabytes of data out of there backups.

To CommVault's Chief Technologist, Cloud Solutions Group Paul McClure we first wanted to know, "To what degree has experience with your customers driven your new solutions?"

Paul: Defining new software solutions based on feedback and experience with our customers and partners is a key part of our philosophy here at CommVault. It is a philosophy we call Solving Forward.

Understanding the use cases that organizations need to address both today and in the future not only allows CommVault to maintain an innovative edge over our competition but also ensures we are relevant to our customers' needs in an ever changing market.

Roger: How much do you think about Big Data and Internet of Things these days?

Paul: CommVault is focused on "all things data" and as a result, any system, application or "thing" that generates data falls with-in our management realm.

Terms like Big Data and Internet of Things are often misused or misunderstood, and as a result, we always try to design our solutions based on customer use cases and the desired business outcomes.

One area where we are seeing lots of demand is in helping organizations manage large unstructured file systems. We are able to address this challenge with a combination of data protection, archive, search and eDiscovery capabilities that not only improve the economics of storing such large datasets over long periods of time, but help organizations make sense of it, while providing greater levels of access to data and information.

Roger Strukhoff (@IoT2040) is Executive Director of the Tau Institute for Global ICT Research, with offices in Illinois and Manila. He is Conference Chair of @CloudExpo & @ThingsExpo, and Editor of SYS-CON Media's CloudComputing BigData & IoT Journals. He holds a BA from Knox College & conducted MBA studies at CSU-East Bay.

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